Ovechkin an all-star; Green, Backstrom miss out
The NHL announced its rosters for the league’s all-star game today. Alexander Ovechkin will represent the Capitals for the Eastern Conference while his teammates Nicklas Backstrom and Mike Green will not.
Both deserved, and I’m sure got, consideration but in reality neither was the kind of shoe-in whose absence is particularly egregious. Yes, Backstrom is seventh in the conference in scoring, but three of the players ahead of him are centers, and Jeff Carter, who’s tied for the NHL lead in goals, is only one point behind.
Green, who leads the NHL in goals by defensemen and is tenth in scoring for blueliners (third in the East) is a more obvious oversight. But still, Green has only played in 28 of the team’s 41 games, perhaps too high a percentage to be considered for the event.
The approach that ought to be adopted by the team, especially Backstrom and Green, is pretty well summed up by Bruce Boudreau:
“We know on merit that Nick and Mike and maybe Alex Semin should all be on that. But that’s not how [it] goes, and it’s not because they don’t deserve to be on it. It’s how the whole thing is situated. They have to pick a player from every team.”
The all-star rosters are designed for a lot of things: to have a representative from each team, to get players with name recognition, to find players people want to see play with one another in a wide-open (non-checking) game. What they are not designed to do is provide a definitive list of the best players in the league; if you were to ask around, I think there would be very few who don’t consider Mike Green one of the six best defensemen in the Eastern Conference or don’t think Nicklas Backstrom is having a better season than Eric Staal. To put it simply: all-star game selection simply aren’t worth worrying about.
